Sameer Joshi grew up staring at blue skies over Punjab’s fields, dreaming of becoming a fighter pilot. “Dreams do come true,” he says. “I became a fighter for the Indian Air Force, fought in Kargil and was deployed ?in South Africa and France.” Then,? a high-altitude injury cut his dream short and Joshi opted for early retirement. After a couple of years bush flying in the Northeast, he found a new ambition—the Google Lunar XPRIZE challenge. When he and his IITian friends, Rahul Narayan, DilipChhabria and Julius Amrit discovered there was no participating team from India, they created Team Indus—a mission to land a robotic craft on the moon, a tech moonshot; and with Anurag Rana and SidhantRahi, Joshi formed a new company, Threye Interactive. Threye produced award-winning virtual simulation games like ‘Guardians of the Skies’ for the IAF and creates human interactive 3D applications for aerospace and defence, manufacturing, medical and hospitality sectors. “We want to embed the real and virtual in a way that makes our world safer,” Joshi says. “Our vision is long-term because government initiatives take time to trickle down to the grass-roots level where we are working. Tech innovation in India is where Google was in ’98—only beginning to take off.”